I'm not saying you should make a bunch of changes just for sake of making changes. I think the laws against electoral tampering and electoral fraud just need to be more vigorously enforced. Hence my suggestion about kicking asses and putting lots of people in jail.
If you ask me, Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, and Washington... whatever, are proof that the American Democratic and Republican parties both need to be disbanded and many of their members arrested. They're hideously corrupt, and neither side seems to see anything wrong with stealing as many votes as possible.
In the long run though, maybe it would be wise for the government to have ZERO power over elections. It seems somehow... wrong for the state Republicans or Democrats to be able to run the elections in which their federal counterparts are running. Most non-shitty nations put an independent comission in charge of elections, and everyone watches them religiously for signs of bias. It's easy to enforce accountability on a feeble, powerless little comission, whereas it's very hard to enforce accountability on a nigh-omnipotent government beauracracy.
You know, I'm pretty sure Mr. Martin had to run for his seat in parliment, just like everyone else. Not to mention that you got to vote for the MPs who selected him as the head of their party. For a minor fee you could even join the party and vote for the head the party yourself.
The fact that you can't vote for the head of state is meaningless, since the head of state has absolutely no power in Canada and isn't a real part of the government.
Democracy is EXACTLY mob rule. It's just that the mob is usually very reasonable, and generally disapproves of mass slaughter or the needless nuking of eyesore cities.
Ah yes, the American media, who genuinely don't care that they are doing far more harm than good. There is no debate in which they can't reduce the level of discourse. There is nothing they can't spin into something unrecognizable.
Wow, I like the way you think. Why not wait until America's electoral fraud problems become the world's worst, and THEN fix them? Or why not wait until every other country fixes their electoral systems, and THEN deal with America's problems? That'll work. Right.
There's nothing worse than people who try to ignore their nation's problems by pointing out that some other nation, somewhere, is worse. But hey, at least America isn't as bad as the Ukraine! Sure, every other western democracy has a superior system, but America is fine as long as at least one nation has a shittier democracy.
When are these asshats going to clue in to the fact that we live in a democracy. If 90% of the population wants free music downloads, then the government and the media industry is in the wrong for trying to stop us.
Normally I would think it's a bad thing when the government falls prematurely. But if they continue to insist on behaving as if the desires of citizens are irrelevant, they deserve what they get.
A lot of the old Unix research gurus in university positions switched to OSX. I can't count the number of professors I've had who would set their Mac laptop down on the front desk, ssh straight into their home or office computer, and run their slides and code demos remotely.
The idea of OSX as just a pretty GUI is a gross disservice. I wouldn't touch OSX (or any other proprietary OS) with a ten foot pole myself, but credit where credit is due.
There are Java APIs for accessing hardware, just like there are Java APIs for doing ANYTHING you could ever possibly want a language to do. Talk about only owning a hammer!
2.4 became ridiculously out-of-date with regards to drivers though. Anyone who had relatively new hardware was forced to go to a vendor-patched kernel to have it be properly supported.
I think this is the unavoidable result of the Linux kernel's versatility. It's designed to be able to run on such a wide variety of hardware, from wee little embedded chips to multiprocessor monstrosities. It's able to run with some much old, obsolete hardware, cutting edge hardware, specialized hardware, etc. There's constantly new hardware coming out that needs to be supported, specific security requirements, etc. There's no way for the Kernel team to have it be everything to everyone at once. The natural result is the it's up to a distributor to put it all together, and choose appropriate combinations of patches.
There's nothing that wrong with depending on an organization (be it commercial like Mandrake or non-profit like Debian) to put together an appropriate Kernel for you. That's not to say you shouldn't give BSD a crack (diversity encourages vigour after all), but I don't think there's anything wrong with the way Kernel development is taking place. Those who needs a rock-solid unfliching kernel can always use a 2.4 series kernel, or use BSD (as you suggested).
Hell, even RMS is doing fairly well. University researchers don't exactly go hungry, and he gets to travel all around the world on the FSF's dime. Nice work, if you can get it.
Most Linux drivers (nearly all, in fact) run as modules; but they're running as part of the Kernel. A linux module is just a chunk of the kernel that can be loaded and unloaded from the running kernel. And if you recompile the kernel, every single module has to be recompiled too (because they have to be linked into the new kernel).
Windows, by comparison, is basically a microkernel. Drivers are completely separate from and independent of the kernel.
This is a security and administration problem for GNU/Linux, one that will hopefully be addressed in the future.
And yet here we are in the GNU/Linux age, compiling device drivers directly into the kernel. Ironic to think that DOS still has one thing over the Linux kernel.
Actually, Torvalds is quite wealthy. RedHat and various other early adopters of GNU/Linux technology gave Torvalds a great deal of stock. RedHat stock (among others) became extremely valuable. If I recall correctly, Torvalds was once in possession of about 16 million dollars in stock from various companies. It came down quite a bit, as these things always do, but he's still quite well off.
Sadly, he's the exception. The entire computing business (and engineering business, and any other business involving creativity and intelligence) is replete with stories like this. Kildall is just an unusually extreme example.
I'd be suing over the title of the book -- correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft didn't build america. In fact, I'm pretty sure America was already quite well established by 1980, seeing as how they it was a global superpower at the time.
Yes, and it's slow as a dog, what's the point of using the GPU if's your going to have a slow windowing system. What was it they say about history and repeating it?
This is one of those things that people keep repeating as if that makes it true. X isn't slow. I've used Microsoft Windows 2000 extensively, and I've used XFree and X.org extensively, and never found any difference in performance. Maybe X used to be slow, but that's simply not true anymore.
Yes, I like your thinking, lets use the same crappy UI designs that we have today, build in a world when the GPU could manage the windowing system...
If you start adding tons of animation and complex effects to the GUI, it's going to start requiring scads of memory and processing time even if it's all done in 2D. You think vector graphics are fast on a CPU? You think font glyphs don't take up space in main memory now?
Go on, render my per-pixel lit purple fury GUI, where the fur moves as the mouse moves over it on your Quake2 rendering graphics card.
Lets see your PIII try to render it in 2D on the CPU. I'll bet my six year old Geforce2 MX handles it a lot better. And while your CPU is choking under the burden, my GPU will be happily using its antialiasing hardware to make the whole thing look great, text and all.
I didn't see your admission, and from the sounds of it, you're buying an SUV for exactly the right reason -- driving through the inhospitable sections of this fine continent of ours. When I condemn the SUV, I'm condemn its popularity and the suburbanites who drive them. I do acknowledge that a few people need them because of where they live -- but those people are a small minority.
As for guns -- you know what? I do blame guns. They make it too easy to kill people. I don't favour banning them (I adamantly oppose banning any tool, even a tool that I personally despise and see no legitimate use for), but I do think people who own guns are completely retarded. Gun owners are putting themselves and their families in danger, and putting the rest of us in danger by encouraging the spread of blackmarket guns (most blackmarket guns are stolen from people's homes).
Having lots of kids is irresponsible because it leads to overpopulation. I can understand having two or three kids -- that's fine. But breeders often have many, many more children than that. Given that we already accept quite a few immigrants every year, it's probably best that the birth rate drop a bit to compensate. I'd really prefer that America and Canada don't end up like India and China. The world already has enough overpopulated shitholes without us packing people in until there isn't enough food and clean water to go around.
You're making the totally unreasonable assumption that the video card would keep everything in its own memory, all the time. Video games don't do this and neither would a 3D windowing system.
UIs are fantastically simple compared to games. They rarely contain more than a few thousand screen elements, only a small fraction of which are active at any time.
Have you noticed that XWindows (as it stands now) can easily handle dozens of windows without depleting main memory? I have 18 maximized windows running right now at 1280x1024x32 resolution. Guess how much main memory X is using? 27MB -- rather than the 90MB your naive calculations would suggest. And I can activate any one of those windows so quickly that I don't perceive the time it takes to drag the windows contents up from the swap space.
You don't seem to really understand how graphics systems work. The only things that need to take up video card memory are the pixels visible on screen. ANYTHING else in video memory is there simply to speed things up a little and take the burden off of the system bus. UI elements rarely change, most of them aren't visible, most of them aren't animated, and most of them are so ridiculously simple that the video cards texture compression algorithms (available on EVERY video card manufactured since 1998) can squeeze them down to practically nothing. UIs can afford much higher latencies than the 60fps necessary to convincingly render a video game.
I could go on and on. The point is, UIs are painfully, appallingly simple from a 3D standpoint. That's why people want to windowing to the video card in the first place. Any video card that can handle Quake2 can eat the most complex GUI imaginable for breakfast.
Clipping regions are trivial in 3D -- you just use the zbuffer. Back buffers are trivial too -- all 3D games have been using double or triple buffering for over a decade now.
A hardcore UI with nonstop animation and dozens of windows opening and closing every second wouldn't even come close to matching the rendering complexity of Quake2, which renders hundreds of moving animated objects at a time, many with complex models and dynamic lighting, some with alpha-channels, all cleanly zbuffered, clipped, and double-buffered. And Quake2 was able to do its 3d rendering in software on a Pentium 200.
This is becoming like a joke thread. The whole point of getting the video card to handle windowing is that it's an appallingly trivial task for any video card manufactured in the last decade. You go try playing GTA Vice City on a bargain bin video card, and then try to tell me that managing a few windows and some charcter glyphs is harder.
You really think that a 3D windowing system will push more polygons and pixels than, say, Unreal Tournament? For reference, I used to run UT at 1024x768 resolution with 32bit color and a 24 bit zbuffer (so 3.1MB per frame) on my old Geforce2 MX. And it ran smoothly -- usually about 30 to 50 fps. That card has been obsolete for five years already. It's successor's successor, the Geforce4 MX series, costs about $30, and can play Unreal Tournament's successor's successor almost as well.
I don't think you have any idea how 3D rendering really works, or what graphics cards are actually capable of. 3D windowing is just about as easy it gets.
I don't care that much about Apple hardware. But SUVs affect me -- I have to breathe the air, I have to leave the house without getting run down by one, I have to deal with there being no petrol left in thirty years because a bunch of jerk-offs decided that they needed a truck to drive to work. I'm "pissing in your cereal" because you're pissing in mine.
Asphalt does indeed suck -- it deforms quickly, it doesn't endure weather well, and requires constant upkeep. It may kick the shit out of concrete (in fact, it seems almost certain), and there may not be an alternative yet, but that doesn't make asphalt suck any less.
The university I went to has concrete roads. They are... not good. But they're only marginally better than the ashpalt roads leading to the campus, which are so delapidated and bumpy that they will occasionally shake a car's transmission loose.
SUVs are totally socially irresponsible, in the same way that having too many kids, becoming an alcoholic, or being racist is. No one wants to ban these things (at least no one rational does), but these things should still be condemned, and the people who engage in them should be acknowledged as the assholes they are. And if you're that pissed off at the idea of driving a vehicle that pollutes less, then you are indeed an asshole too.
It's nothing to do with jealousy -- no one is jealous of your crappy SUV. SUVs are terrible, and you're a moron for buying into a stupid trend. There are vehicles I'm jealous of -- I'd love a BMW. I don't hate BMW owners. I think they're lucky people. I also don't hate people who own $5000 gaming computers, despite the fact that I'd love be to able to spend that much on a glorified toy. I DO hate SUV owners, because they're gullible sheep who waste they're money on crap and are ruining the environment and depleting a resource that needs to be conserved.
So fuck off about jealousy, okay? You bought a vehicle that is marketed at suburbanites with more money than common sense, that is ruining the air quality in your neighbourhood, that increases your risk of being involved in a fatal accident, and which vastly increases the amount of money you spend on petrol. Deal with it.
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If you ask me, Florida 2000, Ohio 2004, and Washington... whatever, are proof that the American Democratic and Republican parties both need to be disbanded and many of their members arrested. They're hideously corrupt, and neither side seems to see anything wrong with stealing as many votes as possible.
In the long run though, maybe it would be wise for the government to have ZERO power over elections. It seems somehow... wrong for the state Republicans or Democrats to be able to run the elections in which their federal counterparts are running. Most non-shitty nations put an independent comission in charge of elections, and everyone watches them religiously for signs of bias. It's easy to enforce accountability on a feeble, powerless little comission, whereas it's very hard to enforce accountability on a nigh-omnipotent government beauracracy.
The fact that you can't vote for the head of state is meaningless, since the head of state has absolutely no power in Canada and isn't a real part of the government.
Democracy is EXACTLY mob rule. It's just that the mob is usually very reasonable, and generally disapproves of mass slaughter or the needless nuking of eyesore cities.
Ah yes, the American media, who genuinely don't care that they are doing far more harm than good. There is no debate in which they can't reduce the level of discourse. There is nothing they can't spin into something unrecognizable.
There's nothing worse than people who try to ignore their nation's problems by pointing out that some other nation, somewhere, is worse. But hey, at least America isn't as bad as the Ukraine! Sure, every other western democracy has a superior system, but America is fine as long as at least one nation has a shittier democracy.
The American electoral system is getting pretty lame. A whole lot of asses need to be soundly kicked and then tossed in jail forever.
Normally I would think it's a bad thing when the government falls prematurely. But if they continue to insist on behaving as if the desires of citizens are irrelevant, they deserve what they get.
These laws pertain to the distribution of email lists, not spamming itself.
The idea of OSX as just a pretty GUI is a gross disservice. I wouldn't touch OSX (or any other proprietary OS) with a ten foot pole myself, but credit where credit is due.
There are Java APIs for accessing hardware, just like there are Java APIs for doing ANYTHING you could ever possibly want a language to do. Talk about only owning a hammer!
2.4 became ridiculously out-of-date with regards to drivers though. Anyone who had relatively new hardware was forced to go to a vendor-patched kernel to have it be properly supported.
There's nothing that wrong with depending on an organization (be it commercial like Mandrake or non-profit like Debian) to put together an appropriate Kernel for you. That's not to say you shouldn't give BSD a crack (diversity encourages vigour after all), but I don't think there's anything wrong with the way Kernel development is taking place. Those who needs a rock-solid unfliching kernel can always use a 2.4 series kernel, or use BSD (as you suggested).
Besides, Mono can probably compile to machine code, just like anything else.
Hell, even RMS is doing fairly well. University researchers don't exactly go hungry, and he gets to travel all around the world on the FSF's dime. Nice work, if you can get it.
Windows, by comparison, is basically a microkernel. Drivers are completely separate from and independent of the kernel.
This is a security and administration problem for GNU/Linux, one that will hopefully be addressed in the future.
And yet here we are in the GNU/Linux age, compiling device drivers directly into the kernel. Ironic to think that DOS still has one thing over the Linux kernel.
Sadly, he's the exception. The entire computing business (and engineering business, and any other business involving creativity and intelligence) is replete with stories like this. Kildall is just an unusually extreme example.
You shouldn't let peoples' attempts at levity bother you so much. You'll live longer, "punkass".
I'd be suing over the title of the book -- correct me if I'm wrong, but Microsoft didn't build america. In fact, I'm pretty sure America was already quite well established by 1980, seeing as how they it was a global superpower at the time.
As for guns -- you know what? I do blame guns. They make it too easy to kill people. I don't favour banning them (I adamantly oppose banning any tool, even a tool that I personally despise and see no legitimate use for), but I do think people who own guns are completely retarded. Gun owners are putting themselves and their families in danger, and putting the rest of us in danger by encouraging the spread of blackmarket guns (most blackmarket guns are stolen from people's homes).
Having lots of kids is irresponsible because it leads to overpopulation. I can understand having two or three kids -- that's fine. But breeders often have many, many more children than that. Given that we already accept quite a few immigrants every year, it's probably best that the birth rate drop a bit to compensate. I'd really prefer that America and Canada don't end up like India and China. The world already has enough overpopulated shitholes without us packing people in until there isn't enough food and clean water to go around.
UIs are fantastically simple compared to games. They rarely contain more than a few thousand screen elements, only a small fraction of which are active at any time.
Have you noticed that XWindows (as it stands now) can easily handle dozens of windows without depleting main memory? I have 18 maximized windows running right now at 1280x1024x32 resolution. Guess how much main memory X is using? 27MB -- rather than the 90MB your naive calculations would suggest. And I can activate any one of those windows so quickly that I don't perceive the time it takes to drag the windows contents up from the swap space.
You don't seem to really understand how graphics systems work. The only things that need to take up video card memory are the pixels visible on screen. ANYTHING else in video memory is there simply to speed things up a little and take the burden off of the system bus. UI elements rarely change, most of them aren't visible, most of them aren't animated, and most of them are so ridiculously simple that the video cards texture compression algorithms (available on EVERY video card manufactured since 1998) can squeeze them down to practically nothing. UIs can afford much higher latencies than the 60fps necessary to convincingly render a video game.
I could go on and on. The point is, UIs are painfully, appallingly simple from a 3D standpoint. That's why people want to windowing to the video card in the first place. Any video card that can handle Quake2 can eat the most complex GUI imaginable for breakfast.
A hardcore UI with nonstop animation and dozens of windows opening and closing every second wouldn't even come close to matching the rendering complexity of Quake2, which renders hundreds of moving animated objects at a time, many with complex models and dynamic lighting, some with alpha-channels, all cleanly zbuffered, clipped, and double-buffered. And Quake2 was able to do its 3d rendering in software on a Pentium 200.
This is becoming like a joke thread. The whole point of getting the video card to handle windowing is that it's an appallingly trivial task for any video card manufactured in the last decade. You go try playing GTA Vice City on a bargain bin video card, and then try to tell me that managing a few windows and some charcter glyphs is harder.
I don't think you have any idea how 3D rendering really works, or what graphics cards are actually capable of. 3D windowing is just about as easy it gets.
Asphalt does indeed suck -- it deforms quickly, it doesn't endure weather well, and requires constant upkeep. It may kick the shit out of concrete (in fact, it seems almost certain), and there may not be an alternative yet, but that doesn't make asphalt suck any less.
The university I went to has concrete roads. They are ... not good. But they're only marginally better than the ashpalt roads leading to the campus, which are so delapidated and bumpy that they will occasionally shake a car's transmission loose.
SUVs are totally socially irresponsible, in the same way that having too many kids, becoming an alcoholic, or being racist is. No one wants to ban these things (at least no one rational does), but these things should still be condemned, and the people who engage in them should be acknowledged as the assholes they are. And if you're that pissed off at the idea of driving a vehicle that pollutes less, then you are indeed an asshole too.
It's nothing to do with jealousy -- no one is jealous of your crappy SUV. SUVs are terrible, and you're a moron for buying into a stupid trend. There are vehicles I'm jealous of -- I'd love a BMW. I don't hate BMW owners. I think they're lucky people. I also don't hate people who own $5000 gaming computers, despite the fact that I'd love be to able to spend that much on a glorified toy. I DO hate SUV owners, because they're gullible sheep who waste they're money on crap and are ruining the environment and depleting a resource that needs to be conserved.
So fuck off about jealousy, okay? You bought a vehicle that is marketed at suburbanites with more money than common sense, that is ruining the air quality in your neighbourhood, that increases your risk of being involved in a fatal accident, and which vastly increases the amount of money you spend on petrol. Deal with it.